Philippine Prudential eyes IPO in five years

Philippine Prudential Life Insurance Co. Inc., a privately held insurance company, is pondering to go public in five years, or even earlier than that if the opportunity arises, a top company official told The Manila Times.

Gregorio Mercado, Philippine Prudential president and chief executive officer, said that the company has plans to go public through the equities market in the next five years. This is for the company to tap more capital.

“If the opportunity is there, baka mapaaga pa [the listing in the Philippine Stock Exchange may happen earlier than five years],” he added.

The company is currently in talks with groups of both foreign and local investors for capital infusion to establish a P1-billion insurance firm by 2022, in accordance with a recently signed law.

In the previous month, President Benigno Aquino 3rd signed a new law that aims to stabilize further up the country’s insurance industry, requiring life and nonlife insurance companies to have P1 billion in paid-up capital.

Specifically, existing insurance firms must have a net worth of P250 million by June 30, 2013; P550 million by December 31, 2016; P900 million by December 31, 2019; and P1.3 billion by December 31, 2022.

“We’re still quite far [from P1.3-billion capitalization], that’s still nine years away from now. Right now, our net worth is about P360 million, so we have a long way to go. But the capital requirement is only P250 million as of 2013, so we beat that, so our next is in 2016, when the capital is raised to P550-million net worth, that’s why we’re talking to some other interested parties over,” Mercado said.

“The investors we are talking to can take care of the capital requirements, just depends on who will give us the best offer,” he added.

However, Mercado specified that the firm “haven’t been talking to anyone seriously,” adding that they were once approached by the foreign company about merger talks.